Sight Unseen: Come and See 2

Yeah, I’m crazy. What else am I doing? I’m watching this movie and it’s like playing games with old men: every move seems to matter. But with whom am I allied, at this nondescript age, this age of bastards hiding food in their socks? The thing is just to dig and get nowhere. To go on digging like there’s a place underground, to never get dragged to the surface by your hair. To not get got. To shit in a can and eat it with your fingers but never get found out, never beaten with sticks, or ordered about like some idiot animal, or seen disrobed and unarmed as only good for one thing. I hear the good times are over. It comes from a man threatening to fuck someone’s mutter. His pants are full up, in Berlin, to strains of Mozart. When I return from the kiosk the cinema is empty. But then piled up in a heap right at the back I see they’re still there. For the love of God give me a weapon. My heart is going nowhere and the sun is set to kill us all. My heart, I find, is where they cram in all the crowds; and if I’d known they’d all be drinking, I’d have placed it farther away, where the women like to sleep late—in case they’re early for being alive. The infants they carry are the size of fists and made of shrapnel. Milked or not, they save themselves for holidays and funerals. They say, You call that a face? They say, We’d rather eat you than make room for a cow. Fascists is a password they use: it means Hitler is crying in his sleep. We’ll all be asked one day whether we’re wounded or sick, and we’ll be expected to know. But I realize now I’m barely alive: I don’t hear the birds singing, my skin is box-calf leather, and what I took to be tertiary syphilis is just guinea pigs howling. I’m watching families die, families with only one arm, and no balls, and all its dongs ripped out like baby hair. The whole cinema’s sitting soaked in gasoline, when no one has a light. And still the wolf walks on like it’s snuggling in a woman’s tits, like a guy drunk on vodka he made out of soap. Our combined flatulence will flatten America, turn it Gestapo black, and a lot of people will be starving to death, in German. In order not to infect new generations, I have Europe stuck in my upper intestine. But what a picture! Even though the intelligentsia all got drowned, and it was left to the 15th Einsatzkommando to translate it. No matter, not every sequence of words needs a right to exist. When the lights come back on we’re all this film’s inhabitants, all its contagion, all burning to the ground in the shape of a pelican.